Permit us, comrades, to turn to your hospitality on account of
the forced suspension of our Party paper. Certain papers have
begun a furious baiting campaign against us, accusing us of
espionage or of communicating with an enemy government.

The extraordinary thoughtlessness (an inappropriate and much too
weak a word) with which this baiting is con ducted may be seen
from the following plain facts. Zhivoye Slovo first
published a statement that Lenin was a spy. Then, in a
“correction” which is supposed not to change any
thing, it declared that he was not accused of spying! First the
paper came out with Yermolenko’s testimony, then it was
compelled to admit that it is downright awkward and shameful to
see such a person’s testimony as evidence.

The name of Parvus is dragged in, without mentioning, however,
that no one denounced Parvus as sharply and mercilessly, as far
back as 1915, as the Geneva Sotsial-Demokrat, which we
edited and which, in an article entitled “The Uttermost,
Limit”, branded Parvus as “a renegade’.’
“licking Hindenburg’s
boots”,[1]
etc. Every literate
person knows, or can easily find out, that all political or
other relations between ourselves and Parvus are completely out
of the question.

The name of one Sumenson is trotted out, a woman with whom we
have never even met, let alone had anything to do. Business
enterprises of Hanecki and Kozlovsky are also dragged in, but
not a single fact is mentioned as to where, how and when the
business was a screen for espionage.
Not only have we never participated directly or indirectly in
business enterprises, but we have never received from any of the
above comrades a single kopek either for our selves personally or
for the Party.

They go so far as to blame us for Pravda dispatches
being reprinted in a distorted fashion by German newspapers, but
they “forget” to mention that Pravda issues
German and French bulletins abroad and that the reprinting of
material from these bulletins is entirely
free.[2]

And all this is done with the participation and even on the
initiative of Alexinsky, who has not been admitted to the
Soviet, who, in other words, has been recognised as an obvious
slanderer!! Is it really impossible to under stand that
such methods against us are tantamount to legal
assassination? The Central Executive Committee’s discussion
of the conditions on which the Committee’s members could be
brought to court undoubtedly introduces an element of
orderliness.[3]
Will the Socialist-Revolutionary and Menshevik
parties want to participate in an attempt at legal
assassination? Will they.want to take part in an attempt to put
us on trial without even indicating whether we are accused of
espionage or mutiny, in an attempt to put us on trial without
any precise indictment at all? Will they want to take part in an
attempt to stage’ an obviously unfair trial which may handicap
their own candidates in the Constituent Assembly elections?
Will those parties want to make the eve of the convocation of a
Constituent Assembly in Russia the beginning of a Dreyfusiad on
Russian soil?

The near future will give an answer to these questions which we
deem it the duty of the free press to raise openly.

We are not talking about the bourgeois press. Of course,
Milyukov believes in our espionage or in our acceptance of
German money about as much as Markov and Zamyslovsky believed
that Jews drink children’s blood.

Notes

[2]Byulleten “Pravdy” (The “Pravda” Bulletin) was published in
German in Stockholm from June to November 1917 under the title
of Russische Korrespondenz “Prawda”. Its publisher was a C.C.
R.S.D.L.P.(B.) group abroad, and it carried articles on major
issues of the Russian revolution, documents, reviews, and news
items on the life of the Party and the country. There was also
a French edition.

[3]After the reactionary Zhivoye Slovo had published the infamous
calumny against Lenin, the Menshevik and S.R. Central Executive
Committee of the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies on
July 5 (18), 1917, appointed a commission of inquiry at the instance
of the Bolshevik group to investigate the slanderous charges against
Lenin and other Bolsheviks. But as soon as the Provisional
Government had decided to refer the case “of the organised armed action
in the city of Petrograd on July 3–5, 1917, against state power”
to the Petrograd Court, the C.E.C. commission of inquiry resigned
and on July 9 (22) published in Izvestia the statement that it was
“discontinuing its activity and putting the evidence collected by
it at the disposal of a government committee”. At a joint meeting
held by the C.E.C. of the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies
and the Executive Committee of the All-Russia Congress of
Peasants’ Deputies on July 13 (26), the Mensheviks and
Socialist-Revolutionaries put through a resolution stating that they
considered Lenin’s refusal to appear in court absolutely impermissible.
The resolution said that all persons against whom charges had been
preferred by the judicial authorities were removed from work in
the Soviets.